Latest news from Techwell

Techwell Introduces Two Multi-Channel Video Decoder Solutions With Embedded PCI
Express Interface to Simplify Hardware Design

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 3, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Techwell, Inc. (Nasdaq:TWLL),
a leading designer of mixed signal video semiconductor solutions for the
security surveillance, automotive, and consumer electronics markets, today
announced two multi-channel video capture products, the TW6864 and the TW6868.
These devices feature Techwell's premium quality 4-in-1 video decoder technology
-- which has the best weak signal performance in the industry, four
high-performance audio ADCs, and an integrated PCI Express interface. This high
level of integration simplifies the PC DVR card hardware design and reduces
production costs.

Demonstrated at the CPSE show in Shenzhen, China earlier this week, the TW6864
and TW6868 take advantage of the significantly faster speed and overall larger
data bandwidth of the PCI Express interface -- a feature in high demand for
security surveillance systems utilizing a software compression PC DVR card.

The TW6864 and TW6868 support both real time and non-real time video and can
output multiple video resolutions including D1, half D1, and CIF, providing
maximum application flexibility. Techwell's proprietary video locking technology
enables a non-real time switching speed that is faster than competitive
products, allowing for the highest possible frame rate per channel. In addition,
both ICs contain a high-performance proprietary DMA controller that fully
utilizes the PCIe x1 bandwidth, enabling video and audio data transfer at an
optimal throughput rate.

The TW6864 can decode and transfer four channels of real time D1 video (up to 16
channels of non-real time video) and four channels of audio. In comparison, the
TW6868 can be cascaded with an external Techwell 4-in-1 decoder such as the
TW2865 to achieve eight channels of real time D1 video and 9 channels of audio.
In non-real time mode, the TW6868 (when combined with TW2865) can support up to
24 channels of video.

"The PCIe bus is becoming the dominant interface on the PC motherboard.
Fortunately, the TW6864 and TW6868 provide a versatile and scalable solution for
the software compression PC DVR card market," said David Nam, Techwell's VP of
sales and marketing. "Techwell has set the precedent for highly integrated
front-end surveillance video semiconductor solutions since 2001 and these two
new video decoder solutions demonstrate why we continue to be the market
leader."

About Techwell, Inc.

Techwell is a semiconductor company that designs, markets and sells mixed signal
integrated circuits for multiple video applications in the security
surveillance, automotive and consumer electronics markets. Techwell designs both
general purpose and application specific products that enable the conversion of
analog video signals to digital form and perform advanced digital video
processing to facilitate the display, storage and transport of video content.
Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Techwell currently has more than 200
employees in the U.S., Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan. More information is
available at http://www.techwellinc.com

Surveillance recorder standards

A draft document on the proposed surveillance recorder standards that aims to set interoperability standards among different surveillance recorder manufacturers is out already.  The group spearheading this thrust is called the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA) and is composed of major industry players such as GE, Pelco, Cisco, Texas Instruments, etc.

By setting a standard, the group aims to reduce problems related to managing various DVR and NVR brands in one system, which is a typical problem of large organizations which needs to maintain several backend systems to control and manage varying subsystems.

You can read more about the document at:

http://www.psialliance.org/documents/1013RaCMRel.pdf

Internet eyes video monitoring service

There is a new video monitoring company in the UK called Internet Eyes that aims to provide video and alarm monitoring service for companies reportedly using hundreds of "freelance" viewers motivated by a GBP 1200 reward prize.  Looks very promising, but I think there are issues that need to be addressed especially on reliability and accountability.  Also, the one time monthly prize money, may not be a better motivator than small but incremental prizes.  Let's see how it goes.  Their site goes live this November.

http://interneteyes.co.uk/

An invisibility cloak?

An interesting video on possible technologies that will render someone invisible.

Spoofing IP based CCTV systems

The case against the security of IP based CCTV systems was recently highlighted with the release of a new tool shown at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas.  A security assessment tool, Videojak has the ability to both intercept Internet video feeds and eject false 'looped' images.

Similar in concept to Hollywood's "Mission Impossible" where the attacker can hack, monitor and record a CCTV feed (when nothing is happening), then play this back in a loop to hide the actual live feed (presumably while Tom Cruise is lowered down on a black rope).

This tool also provides the ability to intercept video conferencing.

To be on the safe side, if you are using any kind of conferencing facility you should assume that the information can be intercepted. With the popularity of IP streamed video systems we are not sure if our network is compromised or not.

It's Friday!

It's beer Friday everyone!  Good day!

CUDA

A major issue found in Network Video Recorders is high CPU utilization.  Unlike in DVRs where encoding and decoding is being done by hardware, receiving and recording multiple video streams, while encoding and decoding them for live view and remote view using just software demands a lot of processing power.  Imagine if there are 32 incoming video streams and resolution size is D1 (720X480), lacking a dedicated hardware encoder and decoder chip,  will heavily tax even the latest PC CPUs available in the market today.  In fact, no present NVR solution can display more than 4 simultaneous D1 streams while recording them at the same time.

CUDA to the rescue

Short of installing another encoder/decoder card, one can use the spare processing power of a PC GPU (Graphic processing unit) for encoding and decoding, as well as add more capabilities to the system.   Last year, Nvidia released the developer kit for CUDA for various developers, to enable applications to take advantage of the powerful NVIDIA GPUs.

What is CUDA?

CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA. CUDA is the computing engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units or GPUs that is accessible to software developers through industry standard programming languages. Programmers use 'C for CUDA' (C with NVIDIA extensions), compiled through a PathScale Open64 C compiler, to code algorithms for execution on the GPU. CUDA architecture supports a range of computational interfaces including OpenCL and DirectCompute. Third party wrappers are also available for Python, Fortran, Java and Matlab.

The latest drivers all contain the necessary CUDA components. CUDA works with all NVIDIA GPUs from the G8X series onwards, including GeForce, Quadro and the Tesla line. NVIDIA states that programs developed for the GeForce 8 series will also work without modification on all future Nvidia video cards, due to binary compatibility. CUDA gives developers access to the native instruction set and memory of the parallel computational elements in CUDA GPUs. Using CUDA, the latest NVIDIA GPUs effectively become open architectures like CPUs. Unlike CPUs however, GPUs have a parallel "many-core" architecture, each core capable of running thousands of threads simultaneously - if an application is suited to this kind of an architecture, the GPU can offer large performance benefits.

In the computer gaming industry, in addition to graphics rendering, graphics cards are used in game physics calculations (physical effects like debris, smoke, fire, fluids); examples include PhysX and Bullet. CUDA has also been used to accelerate non-graphical applications incomputational biology, cryptography and other fields by an order of magnitude or more. An example of this is the BOINC distributed computing client.


CUDA provides both a low level API and a higher level API. The initial CUDA SDK was made public on 15 February 2007, for Microsoft Windowsand Linux. Mac OS X support was later added in version 2.0, which supersedes the beta released February 14, 2008.

GPUs are cheap, massively parallel, programmable compute devices that can be used for many general purpose (non-graphics) tasks. They are a "good fit" for many scientific applications and significant speedups (as compared to contemporary CPUs) have been reported. The CUDA language makes NVIDIA GPUs accessible to developers through a series of extensions to C (with no mention of pixels or shading!).

By harnessing CUDA, it may be possible to have high quality recording simultaneous with multiple high quality video streams for playback and remote view.  It also deloads the CPU of tasks that can help the application run faster and more smoother.  Expect to see a lot of CUDA based NVRs in the future.

Some links:

http://codingplayground.blogspot.com/2009/02/web-search-ranking-and-gpp-many-core.html
http://www.bikal.co.uk/network-video-recorder/nvr-pro.html